Still, Dying Earth sounds interesting, and I prefer it as short stories. Some authors and works are just better that way, and this seems like it'd be the case, going by intuition.

All of a sudden his shit's literature.

You're probably right. Dunno if it's better or worse that I almost never read the stories about the books/authors I read. On the one hand, I can at least argue little bias/influence apart from the source of recommendation. On the other, I guess it ends up with me looking clueless most of the time.

He's a terrible writer and you don't need to read him ever.

"You read Brown, liar!"

"No?"

"Remember that book about NSA being attacked by mutating cryptogram double-teamed by two one-note nerds, with superfluous murderer and 'muahaha'-grade office intrigue in the background that led nowhere? That was Digital Fortress."

"Oooooh. God, I'm so sorry you have to remember it."

"Your rant was the best part of that road trip."

Now we're watching Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Then I'll get back to you once I read Dying Earth. It's not unknown to me, Vance especially the D&D magic system is even called 'Vancian', but iirc his books were nigh impossible to get in Poland. Still are, even though there (apparently) was a 2010 translation reprint.

I mean, Name of the Rose is entertaining up to a point. And it's interesting up to a point. And I'm sure it's all metaphorical and shit.

That's honestly a good summary? I was entertained, but ended up confused by both detractors and praises. I liked it because Eco has clearly put a lot of effort towards authenticity and made the 'heady' meanings of meanings of the book digestible and, for a lack of a better word, plain to think about. Contrast it with, dunno, Salman Rushdie, with whom I honestly don't know if I'm too uncouth and uncultured to glimpse his brilliance or intuitively caught on the wink meaning of 'magical realism' as 'flat, meandering story'.

No comment on Dean Brown; that thing practically fizzled out by the time I was in 4th grade.

I don't know what's more precious: listening to Brits and Americans argue about language, or being Polish in the adjacent table trying to not wince at words like 'inrevokable' and 'nukeelar'. Girls, girls, you'd both fail the exams I need to pass to prove 'adequacy' and 'fluency', so stfu.

Played Star Trek RPG with folks, had a blast. I love that everyone 'knew' what my character concept will be, each had a different guess[0], and they were all wrong. At first, we wanted to play in the TNG era, but it quickly turned out that the only trek we all have seen was Lower Decks, so we're going with that one for convenience.

BTW, thanks kb for recommending 'nu Treks' - I (hopefully obviously) wasn't one of those people averse to it because of 'woke', but a couple episodes of Discovery really gave me a bad taste and overall opinion somewhere between "why everyone's first response is to punch other's shit out?" and "why would you make this wannabe Vulcan as the lead? Even I am more likeable than that ffs!" made me hesitant. Then I started hearing about producers having a hardon for Section 31 and went 'pass' pretty much until I've seen your genuine enthusiasm.

[0] - My favourite one was "Trill, but the symbiont will imbue him with memories of something borderline useless, like five generations of sailing or MS Access."

Recently read some Sherlock Holmes and did get that feeling though- everything was such a predictable trope, but I suppose at the time it was a lot more new

I'm not sure, but it was certainly influential. That's why we see it as trite and need its retelling repackaged.

By the way, if you like British humor (humour?) with commentary on (among others) writers stealing and redoing things, I recommend Upstart Crow.

I didn't say it isn't thoughtful or as thoughtful, just that it doesn't flow as well. I think most people who aren't pretentious literary students would be pro Tom Bombadil's removal, and it doesn't take a lot of digging to find it's a remnant from the time Tolkien wasn't sure if LotR would be a full-on children's book or not. The book could easily lose about 50 pages of descriptions and scarcely anyone would care? I could go on, but to me at least, it's simultaneously polished and rough as hell.

EDIT/Addendum: Maybe to elaborate and add a bit of comparison with GEB (you CS folks love it): GEB waxes poetics about recursion for pretty much its entire body, comparing recursive changes of a structure to fugue and drawing parallels. I have no doubt that, just as SICP, it was mind-blowing at its time. But today? I learned about this shit in high school CS and middle school music classes, respectively. Putting it together is perhaps non-trivial, sure, but with the benefit of GEB doing a lot of the work, people who came after can do it all in a matter of 3 hour lecture. So a lot of their impact is just lost on me: I got it in a refined version before, so the progenitors feel clunky.

I finally read Lord of the Rings in full. Between translations (both Polish and German, back when I could read German) struggling to capture the tone and Tolkien requiring a certain mindset, I still can't blame myself for dropping the book time and time again, effectively reading via spaced excerpts until recently. Still, it's good, but probably suffers from the same problem GEB does: because it's the first one to do its thing, it means a lot of the stuff it inspired have a better flow even if they only tackle one of its themes/aspects. It's appreciated, there's value in reading it as a classic/progenitor of sorts, but it probably will never become one of those books I can just pick up and enjoy. It did deepen my appreciation of the movies, though, and they don't require much of a setup.

Słowo jest w człowieku (The word is in the man/person) by Jan Miodek - a famous Polish grammarian writes about common/public mistakes, word usage evolution, and linguistic oddities in a fun way. I liked his TV program (yes, seriously) as a child, and seeing his name on a prominent place at my local library made my day. Unfortunately, it's one of those books that are not only untranslatable (or at least in a way that'd preserve his flair, cf. Tolkien above) but likely unapproachable without, like, C1 level of comprehension in Polish... which, as in most languages, includes a lot of natives.

I'm also trying to read the Vulgate Bible, and it's an uneven ride. There are whole chapters that go in smoothly only for me to stop and go "holy shit, future imperative outside a textbook or Cicero!" or "which of those comes first?" or be otherwise confused. Annoyingly, even though I was never religious, went through confirmation mostly because 'it can matter to certain people' advice from my priest... I didn't realize how well-catechized I ended up being. There are disturbingly long passages where I don't read Latin but recall Polish, and I haven't been to a mass in, dunno, 12 years?

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Sherlock Holmes in SPAA... I mean, medieval HRE. Though I probably wouldn't have enjoyed the book nearly as much if I didn't have The Autumn of the Middle Ages in fresh memory considering all the 'change in the air and passing/ending of ages' themes. The whole story within a story within a story recursive framind device was a bit distracting, but I can't help but think people focus too much on it? I mean, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein dips down to what, a flashback in a dream in a memoir in a letter in a letter, all as hazy and unreliable as in Eco, and nobody who read Franky bitches about that? Dunno, I liked it.

If you're serious, then before you move to Serbia and get your ass beaten by a random Orthodox incensed you got blind drunk on palinka with a Muslim before throwing rotten fruit at a Catholic: there are many places that'd hire you as an English teacher and you don't even need a teaching degree in a private language school. Your chances of getting hired would probably be higher outside Warsaw, but it's a stable line of work that'd open you a channel for work visa. There are also higher learning institutions opening a) new medical schools, b) degrees done in English. MPH would certainly suffice for research/teaching assistant job at many places. Maybe not ideal, but beggars can be choosers until they get a nice car or something along those lines.

EDIT/BTW: These are just my 'shots from the hip' as far as jobs go, I'm sure there's a lot more. You could probably work as an analyst in quite a few places. My, uch, 'enemy with dubious benefits' basically did your programming/modelling class for a living through EY or something like that.

Here are job application sites (I think they have English option?):

https://www.pracuj.pl/

https://www.aplikuj.pl/

https://www.olx.pl/praca/

Public institutions often don't use those and assume you'd navigate their site, so if you'd need my help, you know how to get ahold of me.

Man, my USA isocube worked even better than expected - didn't get the news until 20 minutes ago. Don't get too panicky, the world isn't ending. Probably won't even suck that much more, just in an even less palatable way. Do something with friends and/or a loved one, just don't let the mood get all the way down to Nevil Shute.

Today I realized that the separate journal I write in Latin is full. It's mostly little things, "here's a soup I made - it was a foul, but filling, random mixture" or "this must have been a bumper crop of wallnuts, my hands are sore from cracking 'em" and similar around-the-house notes. Took almost four years, had many long pauses, most of it looks so bad I don't want to read but still evokes the memories, and the quality graph is clearly a see-saw. Again, not a huge milestone, but it did give me a little bump in the competence department.

Actually, morons are gluons, and therefore already massless vector bosons. In QCD, moron gluon sticks around, dizzy from all that spin and loops, unless made inert with either a barticle, lotto kiosk neutrino, or anything that carries cold beer-flavour.

operator operator

Like it's somehow my fault that capitalism is based on fermions rather than bosons.

any formulation of forklift theory not invoking BAC and distance to nearest accessible bathroom will be rejected by the warehouse technician community.

There's an empirically-confirmed, cargo-independent statistical coincidence of bathrooms and charging stations limiting the forklift's half-life. Both forklift operator and forklift operator operator are confined by the cargo potential anyway, so it's implicitly included in the calculation.

See, that's murky. For a properly defined Hamiltonian, you ought to have potential energy defined as independent of velocity, yet forklift theory allows 'lifting' (a Lie group acting a bit like a ladder operator) whilst moving and even accelerating[0] (left as an exercise to the reader). It's clearly an open system without total energy(t) constraint, though a more realistic model removes infinities by adding finite parameters, like LPG pressure or electric charge.

[0] - EDIT/addendum: It has to be stated that an OSHA-compliant operator can only apply lift/lower operator while velocity is zero. Toy-model (think phi-4 field) is a lot more permissible.

So many great milestones, and I only have a tiny one: today I used self-checkout at a store for the first time, because it was also the first time since pre-pandemic Devac-has-no-money times when I went to the store for less than a month's worth of supplies. Between this and not wanting to throw my smartphone at a wall just about every time I hold it, it's almost like I'm finally living in the '10s, yo! :P

Also, I signed up to get a forklift permit, because 1) they look fun to use, 2) why the hell not? The course is almost insultingly cheap for 20 hrs theory and 10 hrs driving under supervision, so my next couple of weekends are gonna be dope.

You know that meme of a teacher stapling McDonald's job application forms to failed tests? In weeks like the recent ones, I think my academic employment ought to have come with a blank BA in Administration (to be filled and stamped after three years). I sometimes dream this was Futurama, and we each got our bureaucracy-issued bureaucrat who'd do all the things other bureaucrats care about. Oh Hermes, I beseech thee!

I like that the only people who try to neg me are headhunters. I love that the ones who go after my clothes carry themselves like nouveau riche after their first trip to the mall.

What's up gamers, I spent three weeks running any% pneumonia-with-maybe-covid (tested negative, lost sense of smell). Basically used that time to catalogue my work stuff and play Kerbal Space Program or Xenonauts. The former is sometimes annoying, because I really want to use some of that sweet sweet orbital mechanics, but get incomparably better results with the 'Kentucky windage' school of space flight. Still, beats not throwing shit at space.

Still one more week on medical leave but, man, I miss going to work.

Could you stop? Please? Of the ~10 regulars left, I don't think there are any unpublished people here. And we're finally low-key enough even spammers seldom come around. You won't get clicks, clients or even a marginal improvement in SEO, so please: either leave us alone, or drop that AI-generated slop and join in on topics like a god damned human would.

Well, that's the thing, though: the time frame. What's the goal here? Bubble habitats containing evaporating gases from ice-rich pockets on Mars, colonists eating mostly algae while hidden underground as a century-long project to make martian YBCO for an L1 electromagnet comes along? Sounds horrible and unrealistic even by bad sci-fi standards, but I'd guess doable on paper. Blue/Green Mars? Nah, that's likely some future heptillionaire's flex project. Less useful than the Aqueduct, more useful than funding statues in temples to Jupiter of the 8th millennium. But by that point, they'll rename Mars for McDonald's, the ancient Terran god of plenty and diabetes.

Dunno what Musk did this time, but I'm guessing he promises self-sufficient Mars colony in the next 20 years or something equally stupid?

I'm reading both Boethian Number Theory (De Institutione Arithmetica) and Fundamentals of Music (De Institutione Musica), and it's a good insight into how people conceptualized numbers and their relations/representations. It has a lot of that "continuous function is the one I can draw without lifting the pen off the paper" meets Feynman's lectures flair to it, describing in word or simple drawing what today would have been a formula/proof. They're even less rigorous than expected, but (often enough) very intuitive and demonstrative at the same time. Not always, heaven forbid; when it's muddled, I can spend more time working through a paragraph than an entire pulp novel, but it's easy to see why they were amongst the primary textbooks pretty much until the early modern period. They also tangetially inspired me to read some of the 'lesser' works by Aristotle in the near future, like On Generation and Creation or Meteorologica.

Combined with my earlier readings of Ptolemy's Almagest and Euclid's Elements, I guess I'm about to finally graduate the Quadrivium ;).

Oh, and yesterday I finished The Viking Spirit: An Introduction to Norse Mythology and Religion by Daniel McCoy. Good read, covers the basics and goes the extra mile to point out the differences between what we know, what we can't know, and what is just romanticized later/modern vision of vikings and their mythology. The translations/retellings in the second part of the book are a bit too stilted, and it honestly wouldn't take that much effort to improve them, but they certainly aren't bad either.

Apart from work going really well and meeting someone who hasn't given me any red flags or headaches/concerns in 3 months, I've been playing a lot of the OG Fallouts and their mods. It's pretty fun.

Let's make one thing clear: when it comes to puzzles, you have to take them as at best a rough estimate of the ability... of puzzle solving. In chess, I routinely beat people with puzzle ranks in the grandmaster range -- and the cockier they are about it, the wider my smile -- because it's one thing to solve a problem and another to get to those positions by skill. In that regard, it's like training for a marathon exclusively on an elliptical: even if you develop endurance, you'll probably die of blisters and fresh air overdose around 10k. But damn, does it bring me joy to see some numbers improve. I even won a couple games.

From what I understood so far, the (opening) theory is muuuch less rigorous than chess, but leagues ahead of Go's "to win, you have to green-fish blue-fish, red-fish two-fish" bullshit. So much more my speed! Dunno. Maybe I have some bizarre learning disability, but it's clear that the more the game is front-loaded with rules and lingo, the less likely I am to enjoy it. And no, it's not 'Western bias'; I despise Bridge/Whist - possibly the West-est, most English game - for the same reason.

All 16 potato plants produced berries. Because I planted six different types, maybe some of them are (viable) crossbreeds? No idea, but it'll be cool to see if they grow next year. I'm also planning on leaving some potatoes behind on purpose, to see if they can self-perpetuate in an enclosure I made for less dog-resistant plants.

Because there are many unused fields nearby, two months ago I decided to help the wider butterfly population by dumping a couple cupfuls of radish seeds over the area. If it doesn't sound like much - radish seeds are about a third of the size of poppy seeds and grow best when a couple inches apart, so they've been tossed widely and sparingly. Doesn't seem like anyone but bugs noticed, though it looks like most seedpods I inspected were already eaten from the inside by caterpillars and the like. Dunno if those will have a chance to continue, but that's also something to see next year.

If you shuffled the words and were about 1/3 families and nuclear superbreeders, it'd be sustainable even without lye-baer-oons.

Nah, I told you already: we're pretty understanding of this. Hell, we have plurals of collective nouns, like 'the police' (nominative singular: policja, plural: policje), so go and wrap your head around that. It's like Latin, but much weirder and less regular. You're fine.

And good one, but what would we do with whole three lie-bear-ians?

Nah, throwing your vote into the pile matters wherever you are. We recently had a Sołtys (like county-level official for rural areas) election where the difference between candidates was 6 votes (out of 250-someting voters). Sure, it's not the same league, our Sołtys is 47 and kicks ass as a public servant, but may POTUS match her importance and prestige one day. Your vote is no less important than mouthbreather's next in line.

I know how good Poland might look if, say, a POTUS gave you half of Ukraine

LOL, come on, that's basic even by my understanding of geopolitics. Ukraine is neither his/America's to give nor ours to take. Also, combining it with Poland would cause a civil war faster than most of you can spell 'Volhynia'.